We have blockchains. We have data that has to be verified with its history, and as such need a blockchain structure.
But we also have messages that are relevant for a few seconds, for minutes, hours, days, maybe a month. They can be on a blockchain but it doesn't do us as much good.
We have user accounts. We want to know who posts something and we want to follow those people.
But sometimes we don't want to follow people. We want to follow subjects, communities, places or combinations of those. And sometimes we want to leave a message to those without any logging in. Like leaving a note on a local message board.
We now know the properties and the desireable elements of blockchains pretty well. But what about systems that don't fit on a blockchain?
Enter ephemeral open networks. My ideas started to grow under the idea OLN, for Open Location Network because of the technology I was thinking of that finally evolved into what I put on whenwhere.cf and localprayers.net. But it can also be read as Open Listening Network. A backchannel for the internet. When you see something neat and you just want it to be out there for anyone who happens to be interested in or tuning in to the same thing. A way to be together via the internet but not limited to any environment on the internet. A network that links our networks without saving all the data of our networks indefinitely.
I mean, you still could put a permanode on an ephemeral open network. That is basically what researchers have been doing with Twitter. Basically we need a more powerful Twitter that can help us with not only people backchanneling the world, but also apps among each other. Location based apps that support each other instead of competing. Open Source services that don't save your data, and better, that enables you to use the same data with other services immediately or even just manually.
What do you think about this? And how would you go about this?
I think it is for sure an interesting concept, OLN is a great name and backchanneling is a cool buzzword. It would be great to have a layer that is chain agnostic and can backchannel into any chain if required to make something more permanent. Are you familiar with the Open Orchard/Open Seed project? They are doing something similar.
Yes, I heard about that :). I certainly think that those projects are inching close to similar things as well... but you never build exactly the same thing, if I rely on that I won't get what I look for/need.
Also I would love to have at least e.g. a PHP and JS implementation to be able to make e.g. dead simple reimplementations of some popular open source software without permanent databases.
Sounds a lot like the sort of thing that Apache Kafka does - just passing around messages. The mempool/p2p network of blockchains basically does the same thing, it doesn't keep anything permanently either.
The tricky part with it is how to pay the providers.
I would say just run a bunch of UIs on top of it and have it run like e.g. Mastodon. You would basically use it like Twitter anyway. You can set up anyone to accept or reject what you want. I was thinking of slightly reworking the original hashcash stamp format with hashcash over a timestamp to have a rough estimate for how long a message should remain based on investment in preparing in (but no guarantees, you still want to be able to be selective on what your node considers spam for example...)
Talking about providers, I think hashcash on its own can provide an interesting pay-for-bandwith model without any money involved, whereas for paying actual infrastructure would be more Bittorrent like: we run it because we want it.
'we run it because we want it' does not become competition for anything. Bittorrent survives because the file sharers were able to weather the political siege whereas the subject ran out of political currency. You wouldn't call bittorrent a service, since it's purely enthusiasts. All bittorrent had to do was separate the peers from the trackers and voila, legal teflon. Not that they haven't and still aren't hurling DMCA takedowns left right and center. It's just fishing trips anyway.
You do realise that hashcash is the very basis of the Bitcoin Proof of Work consensus, right? Well, unless it's worth nothing then if it's worth nothing it's not gonna be expensive to break yada yada yada.
No, the future of internet forums is looking at you right now, it just needs to have some interconnection protocols added, and clients that indiscriminately allow access to any and all forum systems with as little complication as possible. It won't be one network, it will be many. The biggest obstacle is bringing enough of the users of specialist areas into a single pool of connected networks.
We see in these times with the graphene social chains, that this is partly a matter of politics, and partly because the protocol is only somewhat decentralised - decentralised up to the point it costs more than 3 seconds a block. Cutting latency from decentralised networks requires culling the number of nodes that must validate the new transactions. Thus 19 witnesses, and not 9000+ miners like with bitcoin.
The very same tech used to run Facebork and Twatter is also used by blockchains, in their p2p network between validator (miner, witness) nodes. They can have so much bigger userbase because they are more focused on network latency and make no promises about immutability or ownership of the data users put on the network.
It's my opinion that decentralised networks will replace these centralised pestholes once people start to grasp the idea of data that does not need to be kept forever. There is already protocols to pay people for delivering data around the internet (maidsafe, storj, tachyon) and those protocols combined with kafka style partition resistant message relay network systems, with a way to be paid for relaying...
It's a slow process. But the big players already depend on many of the techniques used in blockchains, blockchains just have a few stupid ideals that need to be understood as having a specific place relating to the fight to eliminate the cartelised banking system, and fighting facebook and twitter will not make any progress until the idea of a wibbly wobbly consensus state is accepted. Cos that's how they do it, except you can't install an app on a server and join their network, and get paid for helping deliver content to users.
It's coming, as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow as the earth spins around.